In recent years, the offering of broadband capabilities to the end users is becoming a commodity. Major consuming drivers for these capabilities are the demand for live and on-demand content streaming to end user. The main issue with this is the very high bandwidth requirements these types of services impose on the network. When looking specifically at wireless networks, an additional issue arises—wireless networks are characterized as having limited bandwidth, unstable behavior of the RF link, high error rates and long delays that evolve throughout the networks and are thus far from being optimal infrastructure for these types of applications.
Much work has been done in recent years in order to improve efficiency of delivery of type of content over different networks, thus reducing the traffic load throughout the network and improving the overall network utilization. Currently 3 main technologies exist for moving live content from a source to multiple destinations:
1. Broadcast—usually done over dedicated networks which are specifically built for content broadcast, such as DVB-S, DVB-T, DVB-H and many others;
2. Multicast (IGMP)—a protocol defined over an IP network to stream identical content to multiple users; and
3. Unicast—a method for transmitting content to each user over a dedicated link from a source to a destination.
In new and modern content delivery systems personalization capabilities are a key requirement. The ability to personalize live content to end users in terms of bit rate and/or special content add-ons such as adverts is essential. Multicast streaming delivery systems can't provide the means to personalize the content. On the other hand personalized unicast streaming is not cost effective due to the high cost-per-bit associated with it.
The solutions that exist today for moving on-demand content to end users are based on signaling re-direction between the main server and local servers, by deploying local servers. This type of solution has several drawbacks as it requires business agreements between the operators controlling the main servers and the local operators controlling the local servers. In addition, issues exist regarding the traffic management and traffic statistics as these aren't centralized in the main server thus driving a much more complicated billing solution.
In mobile networks this type of solution isn't feasible due to the mobility of the terminal between areas served by different local servers. Thus, a new “unicast natured” autonomous caching solution, which works in a transparent manner both regarding the central server and the end user without influencing the way the network is managed and served, is required.
The present invention discloses a system and method for providing some or all of the following:
Means of sending live personalized content over a network while consuming bandwidth substantially similar to that of multicast streaming;
Means of caching on-demand content at, or at the vicinity of, the access points, while maintaining the behavior of a centralized CDN (content delivery network), and supporting mobility in wireless networks; and
Means of “adjusting” wireline and wireless network infrastructures to enable optimized high bandwidth media streaming.